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A wonderfully brave breast cancer survivor does a video

Simply amazing that we live in a time when such a wonderful, courageous and articulate ordinary person can present herself to the world. And do it in such a straight ahead form.

This is over 4 minutes without a break and without any loss in focus. I was a little worried when she said it would not be pretty but her own comfort with her body made the point she was making incredibly effective.

As this post discusses, the Komen Foundation – which had one of the highest rated non-profit brand names – pretty much trashed it due to the action of its board. They actually changed their mission and the anger in this video is the result.

Komen made this decision over a month ago – and notified Planned Parenthood of the decision – but had no communication strategy in place to explain to members why it had changed its mission. In fact, it was upset that Planned Parenthood went public. This lack of any sort of a communication strategy – they waited almost a day to respond on their webpage. The most recent post that was there was an announcement that Energizer was a new sponsor. So Energizer bore the brunt of the anger.

But all these debacles indicate one thing – the Komen Foundation simply does not understand the disruptive powers of the Internet. A decision it expected to defend over a normal 24 hour news cycle was in flames in minutes.

We saw the same sort of thing happen with the MPAA and its legislative bills. These groups think they have the system gamed – they have their lobbyists lined up, the news media on the Rolodex and the politicians on a leash

And then the Internet happens, where regular people – like Linda in the above video – disrupt the nice little system.

This changes everything. But Komen had a similar disruptive event happen to them 2 years ago and they simply did not listen or change. They did not learn.

This is an example of how a board can become so out of touch with its membership that it essentially destroys 30 years of goodwill in 3 days. And that any organization that does not have an effective, INternet-ready communication strategy for itself is living dangerously.